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reetings from Australia.
Welcome to this Red-Letter Day. Below you will find today's global celebrations, birthdays and events.
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I could never divide myself
from any man upon the difference of an opinion, or be angry with his
judgement for not agreeing with me in that, from which perhaps
within a few days I should dissent myself.
All things are artificial, for nature is
the Art of God. |
Memorial to the SIEV-X tragedy (see On this day in history, 2001, below) |
In 1792, my Sister told me, I was growing out of my senses.
Joanna Southcott, failed English prophetess who, aged 64,
predicted she would give birth on October 19, 1814
I should live the same life over, if I had to live again;
And the chances are I go where most men go.
Adam Lindsay Gordon, Australian poet, born on October 19, 1833; 'The Sick Stockrider'
Let me slumber in the hollow where the wattle blossoms wave,
With never stone or rail to fence my bed ...
Adam Lindsay Gordon; ibid
Life is mostly froth and bubble,
Two things stand like stone,
KINDNESS in another's trouble,
COURAGE in your own.
Adam Lindsay Gordon; 'A Metaphysical Song'
Unfortunately, once an economy is geared to expansion,
the means rapidly turn into an end and "the going becomes the goal." Even more
unfortunately, the industries that are favored by such expansion must, to
maintain their output, be devoted to goods that are readily consumable either by
their nature, or because they are so shoddily fabricated that they must soon be
replaced. By fashion and build-in obsolescence the economies of machine
production, instead of producing leisure and durable wealth, are duly cancelled
out by the mandatory consumption on an even larger scale.
Lewis Mumford, American architect, culture critic and historian of
technology, born on October 19, 1895; from The City in History, Section:
'Myth of Megalopolis', p. 545
The physical lot of surviving workers had notably
improved, with unemployment insurance, social security, and the new health
services, while their children's school education was assured by the
government-operated schools: in addition, they had, for intellectual or
emotional stimulus and diversion, the radio and the television. But the work
itself was no longer as various, as interesting, or as sustaining to the
personality ...
Lewis Mumford; from The Myth of the Machine (1967-1970), Vol II,
'Technical Liberation'
I'm a pessimist about probabilities; I'm an optimist about possibilities.
Lewis Mumford; attributed
The answer is never the answer. What's really interesting is the mystery. If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you'll always be seeking. I've never seen anybody really find the answer-- they think they have, so they stop thinking. But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer.
Ken Kesey, Merry Prankster, arrested on October 19, 1966
You cannot shake hands with a clenched fist.
Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, at a press conference, October 19, 1971
The vision I see is not only a movement of direct democracy, of self- and co-determination and non-violence, but a movement in which politics means the power to love and the power to feel united on the spaceship Earth. ... In a world struggling in violence and dishonesty, the further development of non-violence not only as a philosophy but as a way of life, as a force on the streets, in the market squares, outside the missile bases, inside the chemical plants and inside the war industry becomes one of the most urgent priorities . .. The suffering people of this world must come together to take control of their lives, to wrest political power from their present masters pushing them towards destruction. The Earth has been mistreated and only by restoring a balance, only by living with the Earth, only by
emphasizing knowledge and expertise towards soft energies and soft technology for people and for life, can we overcome the patriarchal ego.
Petra Kelly, who was found dead, apparently murdered, on October 19, 1992
Petra Kelly was a committed and dedicated person with compassionate concern for the oppressed, the weak and the persecuted in our time. Her spirit and legacy of human solidarity and concern continue to inspire and encourage us all.
HH the Dalai Lama on Petra
Kelly
October 19
is
the 292nd
day of the year in the Gregorian
Calendar (293rd in leap years), with 73
days remaining.
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Armilustrium (in honour of Mars),
Roman
Empire
A Roman festival for the purification of arms – the day the army was lustrated, or purified. It was celebrated every year on the 14th before the calends of November (October 19), when even the public and poor were invited to assemble in arms and offered sacrifices in the place also called the Armilustrium, or Vicus Armilustri, in the 13th region of the city, an open space on the north-western part of the Aventine Hill, probably just south of the present basilica of Santa Sabina. The weapons of the soldiers were ritually purified and stored for Winter.
The army would be assembled and reviewed in the Circus Maximus, garlanded with flowers and the trumpets (tubae) would be played as part of the purification rites. The Romans held a procession with torches and sacrificial animals. The dancing priests of Mars known as the Salii may also have taken part in the ceremony.
Roman military equipment Roman festivals and notable days in the Book of Days
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Feast day of St Altinus
Feast day of St Anthony Daniel Feast day of St Charles Garnier Feast day of St Ethbin (Egbin), abbot Feast day of St Frideswide
(Friðuswiþ; Frithuswith; Frevisse; Fris),
patroness of Oxford, England According to legend, St Frideswide (c. 650 - October 19, 727 or c. 735) was a daughter of King Didan (Didanus of Oxford) and Safrida. She founded a church near Oxford, but Prince Algar of Mercia (Algar of Leicester) decided to marry her. She refused his advances, hiding from him in a tub in the forest while working as a pig keeper, and "she was transported miraculously to the village of Bampton, a few miles west of Oxford, or possibly to Binsey, which is the village over the far side of Port Meadow" (source PDF file). When she returned to Oxford, Algar tried to rape her and was struck blind by lightning. She then prayed to St Margaret of Antioch and St Catherine of Alexandria. The two saints appeared to Frideswide and told her to strike her staff against the ground. When she did so, a well sprang up. This well (now known as the Treacle Well, located in the churchyard of St Margaret's just outside Oxford and identified by some as Lewis Carroll's model for the Treacle Well in Alice in Wonderland – in the Middle Ages, 'treacle' was a word for any elixir) cured Alfgar's blindness. As Algar lived several hundred years later, it is clear that this myth was not contemporary. Frideswide is the patron saint of Oxford. In art, she is depicted as a Benedictine nun with an ox; holding the pastoral staff of an abbess, a fountain springing up near her and an ox at her feet. The fountain probably represents the holy well at Binsey. In Old English, Friðe means 'peace', and swiþ is 'strength'. Frideswide is the patron of both the University of Oxford and the city of Oxford. Sacred wells, springs and grottoes More More Feast day of St Isaac Jogues Feast
day of St John de
Brebeuf (Jean
de Brébeuf) Feast day of St Noel Chabanel Feast day of St North American Martyrs Feast day of St
Paul of the
Cross (celebrated by
Traditionalist Catholics on
April 28) Feast day of St Peter of Alcantara Feast day of St Philip Howard Feast day of Ss Ptolemy, Lucius, and a companion Feast day of St Rene Goupil Mother
Teresa Day, Albania
Feast dat of St
Véran (Veran) Dragons and serpents in the Book of Days
Doburoku (unrefined sake) Festival, Shirakawago, Gifu Prefecture, Japan (Oct 14 -19) Bettara-Ichi, or
'Sticky-Sticky
Fair', Tokyo, Japan Japanese festivals Japanese calendar Independence Day, State of Piauí, Brazil Constitution Day, Niue
1433 Marsilio Ficino (d. 1499), Italian philosopher 1562 George Abbot (d. 1633), Archbishop of Canterbury 1582 Dmitry Ivanovich (d. 1591), Tsarevich 1605 Thomas Browne (d. 1682), English writer 1610 James Butler, 1st Duke of Ormonde (d. 1688), English statesman and soldier 1658 Adolf Friedrich II of Mecklenburg-Strelitz (d. 1704), reigning Duke from 1658 to his death. His state was part of the Holy Roman Empire. 1680 John Abernethy (d. 1740), Irish Protestant minister 1688 William Cheselden (d. 1752), English surgeon and anatomist 1718 Victor-François, 2nd duc de Broglie (d. 1804), Marshal of France 1720 John Woolman (d. October 7, 1772), itinerant American Quaker preacher who travelled throughout the American colonies, campaigning against conscription, taxation, and particularly slavery 1784 James
Henry Leigh Hunt (d.
August 28, 1859),
English poet
and miscellaneous writer, allegedly the model for the parasitic
Skimpole in Charles
Dickens's
Bleak House
(denied by Dickens, who called Hunt "the very soul of truth and
honour") 1784 John McLoughlin, Hudson's Bay Company trader; in the late 1840s, his general store in Oregon City was famous as the last stop on the Oregon Trail
Adam Lindsay Gordon was born in the Azores of British
parents, and after a troubled schooling took himself to the new land
of opportunity: Australia. Here he had what is commonly called a
'chequered career', working as, among other trades: a poet,
horsebreaker, policeman and member of parliament. On November 8,
1855, he quit the
South Australian mounted police when asked to
polish his shoes. His
passion for horses led to several serious riding accidents. One of
these, in July 1868, when he smashed his head into a post while
riding, led to a deepening of his natural inclination towards
depressive illness. His first two volumes of poetry, Ashtaroth and Sea Spray and Smoke Drift were unsuccessful. (Gordon suffered the classic poet's fate of being relatively unknown and unread until after his death.) His business ventures, too, met with failure (he spent his resources on an unsuccessful lawsuit in a bid to recover ancestral lands in Scotland), and it was as a depressed bankrupt that he went to Brighton Beach, Melbourne, on the morning of June 24, 1870, put a loaded rifle in his mouth, and ended whatever private pains he had, about which we shall probably always be in relative darkness. Gordon is the only Australian to have been honoured with a bust in Westminster Abbey's Poets' Corner. He is remembered especially for pioneering Australian idiom in poetry and for a body of work that expressed his love for horses, such as 'The Sick Stockrider' and 'The Ride from the Wreck'. 1862
Auguste
Lumiere, French pioneer of motion pictures
1885 Charles Merrill (d. 1956), investment banker 1895 Lewis Mumford
(d. January 26, 1990),
American historian
of technology, architect and culture
critic, universal humanist, a philosophical fountainhead for the
organicist and environmentalist movements of today Here was my city, immense,
overpowering, flooded with energy and light ... challenging me,
beckoning me, demanding something of me that it would take more than
a lifetime to give, but raising all my energies by its own vivid
promise to a higher pitch. Mumford wrote, among many books, The Story of
Utopias 1922; Sticks and Stones: A Study of American
Architecture and Civilization 1924; Herman Melville 1929;
Technics and Civilization 1934; The Culture of Cities
1938; The Conduct of Life 1951; The City in History: Its
Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects 1961; The
Highway and the City 1963; The Myth of the Machine: I.
Technics and Human Development 1967; The Urban Prospect
1968; The Myth of the Machine: II. The Pentagon of Power
1970. 1899 Miguel Angel Asturias (d. 1974), Guatemalan writer, Nobel laureate 1907 Roger Wolfe Kahn (d. 1962), band leader 1908 Geirr Tveitt, Norwegian
composer 1910 Jean Genet (d. 1986), author 1918 Louis Althusser (d.
October 22,
1990), French Marxist
philosopher 1922 Jack Anderson, American newspaper columnist 1931 John Le Carré, British novelist (The Spy Who Came in from the Cold;
The Looking Glass War) 1932 Robert Reed (d. 1992), actor, The Brady Bunch 1942 Andrew Vachss, author and attorney 1944 Peter
Tosh, Jamaican reggae musician, formerly with Bob
Marley's Wailers (solo hit Don't
Look Back) 1945
Divine (Glen Milstead; d.
1988) 1945 Jeannie C
Riley, American country and western singer 1945 John
Lithgow, actor 1947 Giorgio Cavazzano, comics artist and illustrator 1951 Patricia Ireland, President of the National Organization for Women (USA)
1966 Jon
Favreau, actor, writer, director 1969 Trey
Parker, cartoonist, comedian, writer, actor
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